Distributions of threshold crossing times of messenger RNA

Abstract

Within the studies of stochastic gene expression, apart from the variability of copy number of gene products, the problems of threshold crossing of those products are biologically important as they often lead to terminal cellular events. Here, we study the threshold crossing problem of the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) and present an exact probability distribution of first passage times in Laplace space. The function furnishes moments of any order and also predicts the characteristic time of the exponential tail of the distribution, which we match against Gillespie simulations. We find that all the measures of relative fluctuations of the threshold crossing times show U-shapes within this simple model of mRNA, as was found earlier in more mathematically involved models of threshold crossing time statistics of proteins. Furthermore, we extend the exact formula to include the phenomenon of DNA duplication and the corresponding doubling of transcription rate. As expected, the distribution varies considerably depending on the onset of the duplication stage within the cell cycle.